Rishi Sunak will have suspected that Keir Starmer was going to bring up housebuilding at Prime Minister’s Questions today, and so he came prepared. The Labour leader has been using the Tory revolts on the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill to build his case that the Prime Minister is weak, and today he did indeed open on the latest U-turns on housing. He said Sunak had broken the manifesto promise to build 300,000 homes without consulting voters about it, asking: ‘What changed?’
Sunak was indeed well prepared. He suggested that Starmer hadn’t ‘taken the time to read the detail of what we’re doing’, before listing two of the measures that are particularly important to Conservatives with a tendency to block planning reform: protecting greenfield sites and focusing on building on brownfield.
Starmer joked that the two ringleaders on the housing targets rebellion were unlikely to be cheering because they thought the government would be building more homes.
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